


Real Life at Number Four: Examining Petunia Dursley’s Timeline

by The Corellian Pirate (Turhaya_Hundteth)



Series: The Literary Analysis Series [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Academic, Analysis, Character Analysis, Dysfunctional Family, Family Drama, Friendship, Gen, J.K. Rowling - Freeform, Literary Theory, Love, Magic, Muggles, Podcast, Podcast: Reading Writing Rowling, Reading Writing Rowling, Relationship(s), Timelines, Wizard, Wizarding World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:42:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23940244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Turhaya_Hundteth/pseuds/The%20Corellian%20Pirate
Summary: An examination of Petunia Dursley's timeline, and and look at how Petunia's knowledge of the wizarding world informed her actions and attitudes. Is Petunia really all the bad in light of the incredibly journey she had been through, and the terrible aspects of the wizarding world she had been exposed to?This post is the subject of episode 40 of the 'Reading, Writing, Rowling', now known as ‘Potterversity’, podcast "Unpacking Petunia" (see end for link).
Series: The Literary Analysis Series [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1910779
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	Real Life at Number Four: Examining Petunia Dursley’s Timeline

Understanding a person’s motivations, and the knowledge they use to inform their decision making, can greatly influence how we feel about a character.

I’ve previously looked at [what Dumbledore knew about Horcruxes in a Hogwarts Professor blog,](https://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/guest-post-solving-the-horcrux-mystery/) and examined at what point in time he gained knowledge he did. This information can be compared with his decision making regarding Harry, and sheds new light on what his motivations might have been at the time.

By rearranging the information JK Rowling reveals into a linear timeline, we can see clues to how a character, their knowledge and their potential motivations grow and change over time.

It was Dumbledore’s interactions with Petunia (or lack of interactions) that got me interested in how life must have really been for the owners of Number 4, Privet Drive.

I thought I’d turn this process to a character who’s held a certain amount of fascination for many fans (myself included). A character whose knowledge is not revealed in a linear fashion: Aunt Petunia.

Petunia is a great case study, because on more than one occasion she reveals surprising knowledge about the wizarding world. Petunia’s childhood history is not revealed until after our last interaction with her, and only by returning to the books can we apply what we learn from _The Prince’s Tale_ to her earlier actions.

## Growing up

The Evan’s Sisters were born in the 60’s. From the time her younger sister was born, Petunia may have witnessed strange things at the Evans household.

We know Lily isn’t dangerous with our privilege of hindsight, but at the time, the Evans family may not have known what to make of Lily’s gift. A gift which apparently, she had a great deal of conscious control over, even at a young age.

 _“Mummy told you not to!”_ is the first thing we learn from Petunia about life in the Evan’s house – there are rules regarding magic. Lily must assure Petunia that the moving flower is not going to hurt her, but Petunia is clearly also fascinated by it.

But then Snape appears – “that awful boy” (a comment Harry assumes is about his father) – who clearly doesn’t like Petunia and shows his contempt for her lack of magic from the first meeting. He can also consciously control his power, and uses it to hurt Petunia, purposely dropping a branch her.

Snape set Petunia’s first impression of the wider wizarding world, and it wasn’t a good one.

Between then and the time Lily leaves for Hogwarts, Snape and Lily become close, and I can’t help but think Petunia was not only jealous of Lily’s magic, but of her newfound friendship with Severus.

Severus and Lily lived in the same neighbourhood. I’d hazard a guess that Snape spent time during the holidays visiting the Evan’s house (partly because we know things were not great at his own home, and because we have a clear example where they were both inside the Evan’s house – the day they both found Dumbledore’s letter in Petunia’s room).

No doubt with Severus’ dislike for Muggles (specifically his father) and leanings towards the Dark Arts at the time, he didn’t make himself welcome in Petunia’s eyes. Petunia learns about Azkaban, and potentially overheard any number of other things from her sister and her new best friend. You can’t overlook Petunia’s natural curiosity and nose for gossip. I have no doubt Petunia overheard all manner of things in the Evan’s house.

Potentially that may have included Snape’s thinly veiled scorn for muggles.

After a pleading attempt to get into Hogwarts herself, Petunia convinces herself this is all for the best, telling Lily that Hogwarts is there to ensure Muggle safety from wizards.

The subsequent years for Petunia entailed her parent’s perceived favouritism of Lily, frogspawn and teacup-rats (and probably more of that greasy git, Snape, too) during the holidays. The physical distance intensified the feelings of cultural separation as Lily became more absorbed in the wizarding world.

## Young Adulthood

With the mistrust and jealousy that germinated in Petunia’s childhood, and the lousy impression of wizards laid down by Snape, Petunia opted for the beigest fiancé she could get her hands on.

By 1977 when James Potter came on the scene, he had zero chance of favourably impressing his sister-in-law. Wizards or not, I doubt that there was ever a chance that James - with his sassy humour, messy hair, and lack of job – would have gotten along with Vernon and Petunia.

By autumn in 1979, both Petunia and Lily were pregnant. The prophecy was made, and Lily and James went into hiding. Although they had not met in person for several years (according to Uncle Vernon – but I suspect there is a lot his wife doesn’t tell him), there was at least correspondence. Lily wrote to Petunia to announce Harry’s birth even if it wasn’t well received (possibly Petunia had done the same a month earlier).

No matter how much Petunia had hated Harry, the Dursleys gave him something for Christmas and birthdays. It may have been as depressingly poor as a pair of Vernon’s old socks. But there were letters. If Petunia writes to Lily at least twice a year (for birthdays and Christmas), there would have been at least few letters and parcels that went between Surrey and Godric’s Hollow before Lily dies.

In the Christmas of 1979, Petunia sends Lily a vase _– an object to hold flowers together and keep them alive even after they have been cut down._ Lily calls it ‘horrible’ but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was cheap or thoughtless. It may have just been a difference in taste, as often happens when relatives buy gifts for each other.

But the most pressing question is - Did Petunia know _why_ Lily was hiding? Did she know then about the war? About the danger?

At this point in time, Petunia’s impression of the wizarding world must be horrible. Lily being a part of that world did not absolve it. Think of it this way - if Lily had joined Charles Manson, would it make us think better of the lunatic cult leader? Hell no! If anything (and if we really cared about Lily) we would see it as even more insidious and damaging, having stolen someone we love.

Remember, at this point, wizards were _killing each other_ , and the world was in a dark turmoil. Why on earth would you wish that life on _anyone?_

## The Boy Who Lived

Baby Harry arrives on the doorstep with a letter in his hand. And what a letter that must have been from the man that once wrote to her to tell her she couldn’t come to Hogwarts:

_“So, your sister’s dead. Here’s your baby nephew. I know you already have a baby of your own, but….. well…_

_You’ve got to take him in otherwise Dark Wizards will probably kill the poor kid. Maybe you too? But if you take him in, I’ll do some magic so no one can harm Lily’s blood if he’s under your roof. Should be good…._

_Um, just so you know, the wizards that are after him are like, THE WORST, and I mean that quite literally. They are super evil, so just be careful. But don’t worry! I’m sure my magic is perfectly fine…_

_See you in 10 years! – Dumbledore.”_

Let’s think about that for a second. Dumbledore just _dumps her baby nephew on her doorstep_ , with no visit, no asking if it’s OK, not even a phone call. Just a letter. Your sister is dead – here’s a baby!

No offers of assistance, support, advice or financial help (and James Potter had an inheritance so large he didn’t have to work!). Just a letter telling her to take this baby….

……and hide him from the most dangerous dark wizards of all time!!!!

The. Most. Dangerous. Dark. Wizards. Of. ALL. TIME.

No bodyguard. No check in patrols. Just fend for yourselves, Muggles!

If I were Petunia I would be terrified at the danger, horrified at the careless and insensitive handling of the situation surrounding her sister’s death, angry at the lack of ongoing support, and anxious about how on earth you’re supposed to raise a wizard baby _and your own_ at the same time.

Yet despite all this. They took him in, hoping they could make him ‘normal’, and in doing so, make them all safe:

_“Why we ever kept you in the first place, I don’t know, Marge was right, it should have been the orphanage. We were too damn soft for our own good, thought we could squash it out of you, thought we could turn you normal…’_

## Raising a Wizard

_“I’m not having one in the house, Petunia! Didn’t we swear when we took him in, we’d stamp out that dangerous nonsense?”_

Prior to Harry’s Hogwarts letter arriving, Privet Drive was not without its share of magical incidents.

_“The problem was strange things often happened around Harry and it was just no good telling the Dursleys he didn’t make them happen.”_

Aunt Petunia knew two young wizards as a child – Lily and Snape. Both were _fully aware_ they could do bizarre things. Both _exercised control over their magic_. Naturally when Harry says he’s not doing anything, Petunia thinks he must be lying.

And to her credit, Harry must have been exceptionally ignorant or thick to miss the signs that strange things happen around him. Hagrid mentions it _just once_ and the light bulb flicks on that he is indeed a wizard, but for some reason he failed to connect the dots himself over his entire life, such as:

  * When Marge’s brandy glass explodes, Harry comments that it had been a ‘long time since he had made anything explode’. He must have exploded _lots of stuff_ prior to that when he was angry.
  * The Boa Constrictor
  * Teacher’s blue wig
  * Hair that magically grows back
  * School roof incident



Harry seems to throw these out pretty casually…

Then in stark contrast - there’s the “Revolting, Shrinking, Brown Jumper” incident. With just Petunia and Harry in the room, Harry was let off the hook for this magical accident. Surely Petunia must have known it was magic? A jumper to fit a glove puppet… I think Petunia let it slide because Vernon wasn’t around to make a fuss about it.

Oddly, it doesn’t appear that this kid can’t be physically punished by Vernon. Complain as he might about Harry needing a good beating on several occasions, Vernon never touches him once. There’s one curious scene in Order of the Phoenix where Vernon tries to strangle Harry out of a window as he attempts to eavesdrop on the nightly news.

_“For a few seconds they struggled, Harry pulling at his uncle’s sausage-like fingers with his left hand, his right maintaining a firm grip on his raised wand; then, as the pain in the top of Harry’s head gave a particularly nasty throb, Uncle Vernon yelped and released Harry as though he had an electric shock. Some invisible force seemed to have surged through his nephew, making him impossible to hold.”_

Dudley, on the other hand, can punch up Harry, and I think this is because he shares Petunia’s blood. Aunt Petunia only tries to harm Harry once when she swings a soapy frying pan at his head in Chamber of Secrets, and missed, so we won’t know if she would have been zapped. But it may be the case that sharing Lily’s blood exempts them from Dumbledore’s protective enchantments.

Vernon has no such luxury. Which is why he encourages Dudley to hit Harry with the Smeltings stick, perhaps?

Yet despite all the attempts to stamp out the magic in Harry, Harry never developed an obscurus. Harry never turned Dark like Voldemort. He still flourished into a great young wizard, capable of retrieving the Philosopher’s Stone within a year of Hagrid belting down his door, and despite all odds, was a young man filled with love. I think there’s something in that.

_“Five years ago, then,” continued Dumbledore, as though he had not paused in his story, “you arrived at Hogwarts, neither as happy nor as well-nourished as I would have liked, perhaps, yet alive and healthy. You were not a pampered little prince, but as normal a boy as I could have hoped under the circumstances.”_

## The Horrors of Hogwarts

You think raising muggle teenagers is difficult? Try raising Harry once he turns 11…

Here’s a short list of the horrors inflicted on the Dursleys:

  * Bombarded with letters
  * Hagrid breaks down your door and tells the kid he’s a wizard and he’s going to magic school, and you have no say whatsoever in it (even though you raised him)
  * Hagrid gives your son a pig’s tail and doesn’t even have the decency to magically remove it later, and you not only have to explain this to a surgeon, but pay for the surgery too
  * The Masons, The Pudding and The Owl (and a horrible impact on Vernon’s job)
  * Wizards fly a car to your house, rip the bars of the walls, and steal your nephew
  * A letter from the school tells you that your nephew stole the same magical car, flew it in front of a bunch of muggles, and crashed it
  * Harry blows up a glass _and_ his Aunt, then just runs away… and the Ministry cover for him
  * Harry uses Sirius as blackmail to get his way
  * Mr Weasley, the fireplace and the Ton Tongue Toffee (and there’s a reason Arthur goes off his head at the twins – see below)
  * Dementors attack their only son
  * A bunch of people from the Order threaten them at the train station
  * Dumbledore hits them on the head with glasses, summons Kreacher, and shits on their parenting skills
  * _They have to leave their home and go into hiding from dangerous dark wizards_



Despite all that:

  * They still pick him up every year from the station
  * Vernon relents at the start of Azkaban, and lets Hedwig out
  * Vernon was going to conditionally sign the Hogsmead form
  * They tried to collaborate and try and get him out of Marge’s way
  * He’s allowed to wander around outside the house during holidays
  * They send him letters (albeit curt ones) at Christmas
  * He’s goes to the Quidditch World Cup with permission
  * They basically leave him to his own devices after Cedric dies and Voldemort returns
  * Petunia believes him immediately about Dementors, and they stop blaming him for everything
  * Dudley has the ultimate change of heart
  * Petunia teeters on redemption herself



The reason why I call out the Ton Tongue Toffee is because this illustrates in a nutshell the dilemma Petunia is in, and it may help us understand just how difficult life must have been for her.

Here are a group of wizards (who claim to be friendly) using their magic on your only child. You have no power to fix what has happened, and all you can do is watch the revolting sight of your son choking to death on his own disgustingly large tongue. Suffocating right in front of your eyes. DYING. All the for the sake of a _practical joke_.

What if Arthur had disapparated a minute earlier?

What if Dudley had snuck the toffee up to his room and ate it alone?

Harry noted that Dudley was “suffocating” under weight of his tongue (and Petunia didn’t help admittedly, but what on earth could she do?). What did Harry do? Well, he was inclined to _laugh at it_ – he said he wanted to ‘stick around and watch the fun’.

See, the wizards know that this can be fixed – but how are the Dursley’s supposed to know that? And what kind of a person thinks a suffocating toffee is ‘just a bit of fun’? No wonder Arthur goes into a rage at the twins in a way we have never seen before – and we never see Arthur blow up like that again. Usually it’s Molly blowing up, but this is the one occasion where Arthur truly understands the horrible, powerless position that Muggles are in. Not only that, but from his job at the Ministry, he knows what damage can be done from a “harmless” practical joke.

I agree with Arthur – it’s not funny.

## Bridging the Gap

I’ll leave you with a final thought.

This is the moment where I believe that Petunia really shows her true heart, and bridges the gap with her nephew, and despite what most people think, it isn’t in Deathly Hallows – it’s much sooner – Order of the Phoenix:

_‘Back?’ whispered Aunt Petunia. **She was looking at Harry as she had never looked at him before. And all of a sudden, for the very first time in his life, Harry fully appreciated that Aunt Petunia was his mother’s sister. He could not have said why this hit him so very powerfully at this moment.** All he knew was not the only person in the room who had an inkling of what Lord Voldemort being back might mean. **Aunt Petunia had never in her life looked at him like that before. Her large, pale eyes (so unlike her sister’s) were not narrowed in dislike, or anger, they were wide and fearful.** **The furious pretence that Aunt Petunia has maintained all Harry’s life – that there was no magic and no world other than the world she inhabited with Uncle Vernon – seemed to have fallen away.**_

_‘Yes,’ Harry said, talking directly to Aunt Petunia now. ‘He came back a month ago. I saw him.’_

_Her hands found Dudley’s massive leather-clad shoulders and clutched them._

_‘Hang on,’ said Uncle Vernon, **looking from his wife to Harry and back again, apparently dazed and confused by the unprecedented understanding that seemed to have sprung up between them**.’_

Despite everything – all the fear, the explosions, the unexplained incidents, the danger, the anger, the heartbreak and the sorrow… They are still family.

And perhaps Harry was just a little bit wrong? Maybe it wasn’t the pretence about the existence of the wizarding world that fell away? Maybe in that moment what fell away was the pretence that she did not care for Harry. As her hands clutch Dudley, we know Petunia is thinking about the danger that they are all in.

She looks at Harry, not with blame in her eyes, or resentment, or even anger at the fact that Harry is a Death Eater magnet. She looks at him with fear.

Later, despite everything that has passed between them, Petunia teeters on the edge of verbalising her forgiveness in book 7. But just because she can’t bring herself to _say it out loud_ , doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Doesn’t mean she didn’t _ feel it._

After all, if Dudley can turn over a new leaf (with all that Dursley blood in his veins) it’s not inconceivable that Petunia still sees in Harry’s eyes the very same echo of lost love that Snape does at the moment of his death.

Knowing how difficult ordinary muggle families can find things in the real world, I reckon I’m willing to give Petunia a well-deserved break from the criticism, given the extraordinary journey she went on.

Love is easy to give when times are easy – what is difficult is loving people when times are tough. _Because that’s when it hurts the most._ But you know what? That’s also the time when love is at its purest and most genuine.

***

This post is the subject of episode 40 of 'Reading, Writing, Rowling' podcast - this podcast is now known as ‘Potterversity’ <https://www.mugglenet.com/2020/05/reading-writing-rowling-episode-40-unpacking-petunia/> . Podcast is also available on iTunes and Audioboom.

***

**Thank you for reading! If you liked it, please hit the kudos button below to let me know.**


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